Girl, 13, Held In Mother's Slaying

Detectives investigating the stabbing death of a Schaumburg woman started to suspect her 13-year-old daughter when the girl could not convincingly explain how she too was wounded, even though she said she was not present at the time of the attack.

"Her injuries did not fit with her version of events," Schaumburg Police Sgt. Paul Rizzo said Monday.

Now, the daughter is being held at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago, named in a juvenile petition with first-degree murder for the brutal slaying of her mother, Je Taun Walters, 34. Police said the girl implicated herself in the killing.

Walters was repeatedly stabbed about 4 p.m. Saturday as she sat in a parked car in the 1900 block of Prairie Square in the Walden Woods apartment complex. She died 1 1/2 hours later during surgery at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights.

Rizzo declined to offer a motive for the attack. But he said given the vicious nature of the crime--the victim reportedly sustained more than 100 knife wounds--"the classic school of thought would be the offender would have known the victim, and there was some animosity between the offender and the victim."

The girl, who apparently has no prior police record, gave statements that conflicted with the physical evidence, Rizzo said.

She allegedly told police she and her mother were on their way out to run an errand when her mother told her to go back to their apartment to retrieve something. Police said the daughter claimed she returned to find her mother wounded in the driver's seat of the family's 1993 Nissan Altima.

Police said the daughter told them she injured herself trying to remove her mother from the car.

Two cousins, ages 7 and 9 years old, were in the apartment and were not hurt.

After interviewing the daughter, the mother's boyfriend, other family members and neighbors, and after recovering a kitchen knife they believed was used in the attack, detectives sat down Saturday evening and pieced together what they had, Rizzo said.

On Sunday afternoon, they went to the Chicago residence where the daughter was staying with relatives and brought her back to the Schaumburg Police Department for a second interview.

There, Rizzo said, "the daughter made statements implicating herself in the murder." He declined to disclose what she said. The Cook County state's attorney's office on Sunday night approved the juvenile petition accusing the teen of murder.

She is scheduled to appear for a detention hearing at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday in the juvenile detention center, 1100 S. Hamilton St.

Rizzo said police in the coming days will be talking to neighbors who might have been out of town over the Labor Day holiday weekend and to schoolmates and teachers of the daughter.

They are being assisted by the Major Case Assistance Team, made up of investigators from several suburban police departments.

Police have not yet ruled out possible accomplices.

"It's way too early to rule anybody out conclusively," he said. "We want to make sure any lead is followed up."

Neighbors expressed relief Monday that police had made an arrest--and shock that the victim's daughter stands accused.

"I haven't slept in the last two nights," said Jean Dorken, who lives across the hall from the Walters apartment.

With the news of the daughter's arrest, she added, "I'm just sick. It hurts me to think a young girl would do something like that."

Janis Smith said she was watering flowers on her back porch Saturday when police arrived. She saw officers help Walters' daughter into the back of a squad car.

"The daughter seemed very distraught," Smith said. "She was wearing a blue shirt with a lot of blood on one side of it."

No decision has been made whether to try the girl as an adult, Rizzo said.

The 13-year-old is among the youngest people in the suburbs ever to be accused of a homicide.

The most recent similar incidents occurred in Palatine in 1996, when a 14-year-old girl took a baseball bat and clubbed her father to death as he lay sleeping on a couch; and in Elk Grove Village in 1995, when a 14-year-old boy fatally shot his mother after a fight about the youth's drinking.

In the case of the 14-year-old Palatine girl, the teenager pleaded delinquent--the juvenile equivalent of an adult plea of guilty--to second-degree murder.

A Cook County judge sentenced her to probation and counseling, saying her father brought about his own death by physically and mentally abusing his family.

The 14-year-old Elk Grove Village boy, on the other hand, was charged as an adult.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 24 years in prison; he could have received up to 60 years.